A New Suit Of Clothes For GamersGate

The digital distribution wars seem to be very much back on of late, with EA taking the fight to Steam with Origin and both Direct2Drive and Impulse finding themselves with new masters. Then there’s the quiet man, Paradox splinter firm GamersGate. It’s opted for a different kind of salvo – a redesign. Is it bringing sexy back to PC game download portals? Am I being ironic when I write the world’s 312,232,653,764th reference to a half-decade-old pop song, or am I just being lazy? I don’t even know anymore. I DON’T EVEN KNOW.
Headline features are My Library and a sort of metagame in which you level up a ‘minion’ (as shown above), find achievements and unlock discounts via various quests on the site. Some of this, inevitably, revolves around how much you buy and how often, but there’s also stuff like being rewarded for rating games, so it seems to be as much about encouraging more interaction and community as it is growing the gold tree.

The new GamersGate is live now, and here’s a video showing off the ch-ch-ch-changes. (There is a law which requires every games journalist who writes the word ‘changes’ to quote David Bowie. Whoops! I meant “who writes the word ‘ch-ch-changes’, of course. Phew! Nearly lost my games journalist license there!)